On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 11:20 AM, John Swensen <address@hidden
<mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
A long time ago in 2008, I had spent just a few days looking at the
problem you will be working on for GSoC. Here is a discussion about
what I did on the mailing list archive:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.octave.maintainers/11892/focus=11911
Your solution probably will end up being a lot better (seeing that
you have a summer to work on it), but I simply tried to use
mimeTeX (http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html)
and
mathTeX (http://www.forkosh.com/mathtex.html)
to generate rasterized version of small LaTeX statements.
For the life of me, I can't find my old code, but maybe this is a
decent starting point. mimeTeX is a pretty limited implemenation of
a LaTeX parse and doesn't use the standard fonts. mathTeX, on the
other hand, uses an underlying LaTeX installation to generate the
image of the expression and crop it accordingly. I had also just
tried to do my own calls to generate a PDF page, use pdfcrop, then
convert to a raster, but mathTeX was doing something that made it
much, much faster (e.g 200 per second).
Hope this helps you get started, and I am looking forward to having
TeX support in plot text objects!
John Swensen
address@hidden <mailto:address@hidden>
Thanks, John, that is very helpful background info.